BOOK REPORT: Neuromancer by William Gibson

Title: Neuromancer
Author:  William Gibson
Copyright Date:  1986

My Rating: 3 out of 5 stars ( ok )

Back-Cover Description
The edition I have doesn't have a back-cover description so I borrowed on from Amazon:

Here is the novel that started it all, launching the cyberpunk generation, and the first novel to win the holy trinity of science fiction: the Hugo Award, the Nebula Award and the Philip K. Dick Award. With Neuromancer, William Gibson introduced the world to cyberspace--and science fiction has never been the same. 

Case was the hottest computer cowboy cruising the information superhighway--jacking his consciousness into cyberspace, soaring through tactile lattices of data and logic, rustling encoded secrets for anyone with the money to buy his skills. Then he double-crossed the wrong people, who caught up with him in a big way--and burned the talent out of his brain, micron by micron. Banished from cyberspace, trapped in the meat of his physical body, Case courted death in the high-tech underworld. Until a shadowy conspiracy offered him a second chance--and a cure--for a price.... 

My Thoughts
When Neuromancer was released, it was something unique and different.  At least that's what I've been told.  Unfortunately, it is twenty-five years later and the genre has grown and matured since then.  

It was difficult for me to get engaged in Neuromancer.  I simply couldn't get my reading momentum going, and as a result, it took me a long time to finish.  I can trace this back to one simple reason.  I found William Gibson's writing style very difficult to deal with.  There wasn't a rhythm to the prose at all.  There were rambling sentences describing an action scene loaded with ambiguous pronouns. Cryptic incomplete sentences littered the pages.  I often found myself confused with what was going on in a scene and constantly having to go back to reread a few pages in an attempt to make some sense of what was going on. Most of the time I just gave up and pushed ahead hoping the loose strings would miraculously join together.  More often than not, the strings would finally come together later in the chapter, but I was usually annoyed by that point.

Once I got a bit more than halfway, I wised up to the fact that there was a comprehension phase-shift and I resigned myself to just be confused most of the time.  I just read the words as they were printed and gave up on trying to comprehend the story as it went and my reading pace and enjoyment picked up.

Looking back on Neuromancer, the basic story line wasn't bad at all, I just wish it was written better. Maybe if I read it when it was released, I would have received it with an open-mind and been wowed by cyberspace enough to ignore the writing. Or maybe it's just hard to go back to a classic in this genre, especially if you didn't catch it the first time around; I was ten so I missed that spaceship.  

BOOK REPORT: The Sparrow by Maria Doria Russell

Title:                           The Sparrow

Author:                        Mary Doria Russell

Copyright Date:         1997

My Rating:     4 out of 5 stars  ( interesting)

Back-cover Description

There isn't a true back-cover description, but a collection of review quotes which give the outline of the story.  I've removed the opinion sections of the review quotes.

"If you have to send a group of people to a newly discovered planet to contact a totally unknown species, whom would you choose? How about four Jesuit priests, a young astronomer, a physician, her engineer husband, and a child prostitute turned computer expert? That's who Mary Doria Russell sends in her new novel, The Sparrow. This motley combination of agnostics, true believers, and misfits becomes the first to explore the Alpha Centuri world of Rakhat with both enlightening and disastrous results ... < review wrap-up > "

"<intro to review> Father Emilio Sandoz [is] the only survivor of a Jesuit mission to the planet of Rakhat, 'a soul ... looking for God.' We first meet him in Italy ... sullen and bitter.... But he was not always this way, as we learn through flashbacks that tell the story of the ill-fated trip.. < review wrap-up>"

My Thoughts

The Sparrow was an interesting book in both story and construction.  The storyline kept me engaged with a good mixture of well-developed characters, meaningful dialog, well-timed drama and just a bit of suspense.  

I was most impressed with the anthropological aspects of the alien creatures in The Sparrow.   The same attention to detail provided for the human characters was also applied to the aliens and their world. The only issue I had was the seemingly shoe-horned in personality flaws of the aliens to set up the climax, but it was fairly easy to look over that and appreciate Mary Doria Russell's alien Rakhat. 

Mary Doria Russell builds the elaborate story from both ends, constantly swinging from the year 2016 before the mission started and characters are introduced, to 40 earth years later in the aftermath. Each time the pendulum swung,  it would inch its way towards the climax of the story which occurs roughly halfway through if told chronologically.  Although much is known about the tragic outcome of the mission to Rakhat, Father Sandoz's physical and mental state only help to provide mystery and suspense to the story of the trip to the planet with three suns.  

I would categorize this book as theological science-fiction, however, the theology isn't preachy.  The character's individual faiths are used as a lens through which we see them, but it isn't imposing, which I liked. There are occasional interesting theological debates between the characters, and not just between the atheist and the priest, but even between characters of the "same faith".  However, these debates are not the central narrative motivator. 

However, The Sparrow isn't without flaws. I did find some of the characters shallow in construction.  In general, the Jesuit Priests had character and depth, especially Sandoz.  Mary Doria Russell obviously put a lot of thought and detail into each characters lives, which made two of the characters stick out from the rest; the idealistic genius married couple.  The wife is both a cultural anthropologist and medical doctor and the husband is a retired engineer who can build anything.  They live in an ideal equal-footing marriage in which each is one-hundred percent supportive of every twinkle in their morally superior thoughts, words and deeds.  The couple was welcoming, warm, and happy to entertain any and all guests, and can make anyone laugh at any time.  I wanted to strangle them at times. Did I mention they were the atheist/agnostics of the group? I couldn't help but think they were written that way to help balance the theological debates about the goodness of man and the role in which religion plays in keeping humans from turning into violent hedonists. 

Character flaws aside, The Sparrow was a really good book with only a few minor glitches that prevent this from being rated higher.  I would recommend this to most anyone looking for and entertaining read with some human depth.